Anxiety? PTSD? Eat a high-protein breakfast.

When you eat a sugary or carbohydrate-based breakfast, your blood sugar goes sky-high and then crashes in an hour. The body perceives this as distress--for your primitive brain, a lion is chasing you. This produces anxiety, and in trauma disorders, these emotions activate trauma symptoms. When you don't eat breakfast at all, the same thing happens, only faster and worse. If you don't drink any water during the day, it's worse still. You won't feel it happening, you'll just feel rotten if you struggle with mental health issues, and you'll just think that this is how it is.

"Good enough" is fine!

You don't have to be a health nut or make much of an effort. Cut the bagels, toast, and sugar (including fruit and artificial sweeteners), and eat something high protein with fat, like bacon and eggs. Don't like that? Get creative. If you say, "I don't like breakfast, and I never have," it's probably because you're so used to not eating breakfast. You're probably also used to being anxious or having flashbacks. If you say, "I don't have time," cook a couple pans of bacon in the oven on Sunday, and if you don't have the two minutes it takes to fry an egg, hard boil a dozen on Sunday.

Keep in mind that if you don't drink water with breakfast and during the day, the same thing will happen regardless of what you eat for breakfast. The body requires water to break down proteins and produce energy, and the brain requires a balance of electrolytes to function. Keep

I have seen this cure PTSD in two weeks. This was in the case of a guy who was drinking a Mountain Dew for breakfast. I'm not promising anything, but in therapy this can at least move trauma and anxiety from being untreatable to treatable. I know a therapist who estimates that he has cured 70% of anxiety disorders by looking at breakfast and sleep.

In therapy, the therapist must first assist in eliminating things in the client's life--no breakfast, a rough marriage, irregular sleep--that can change without therapy, and if needed problem-solve why these things are hard to change. Minimal self-care and making a good start taking personal responsibility are both necessary to allow for change on a deeper level. And without these things, what's the point of healing anyway?